Ken Burns is trying to say the same thing that my father was trying to say," said Portsmouth resident Eliza Hobson, whose father Wilder Hobson wrote the first book on jazz published in the United States.

Then 33 years old, Wilder Hobson's "American Jazz Music" hit the shelves in 1939, the product of his wild love affair with music.

Although he was born in New York, Wilder's close ancestors were Downeasters, and to Maine he returned every summer enjoying the season on Squirrel Island in Booth Bay Harbor.

The island was home to the Hennessy Five-Star Orchestra, a jazz band that Wilder and his slide trombone joined in 1921, when he was 15. Wilder's wife Verna was the tuba player.

"These guys were the big rebels of their time," said Eliza, explaining that Hennessy Five-Star was a type of brandy sold on the sly during the Prohibition Era.

"It's interesting, growing up, to try to rebel against rebels," she said.

Wilder Hobson's band owned the summer nights on Squirrel Island, coming into the dance hall at midnight after the traditional musicians packed up their gear.

"Everybody got wild and wooly," said Eliza.

The Hobson family still returns to its summer home, and Eliza said the Hennessy band is still alive and well. Squirrel Island provides a summer venue for the newest in rock and pop, which build upon their jazz foundation.

"He died right as the rock scene was just starting to blossom," Eliza said. "I've thought often at how excited he would have been."

Wilder died in 1964, just as the Beatles were invading America.

Though she admits "rock 'n' roll was a dirty word in our household," Eliza believes her dad, if he had lived past age 58, may have tried to do for rock what he did for jazz by giving it "a respectable status."

The writer's daughter, a former record store clerk, jazz disc jockey and broadcast journalist, said before her father wrote his book, mainstream America thought of jazz as "almost sinful" music created for and by the lower classes.

Jazz provided an outlet for Wilder's musical passion, but his Yale pedigree pushed him toward a more respectable career — as a writer, editor and critic for Time, Fortune and Newsweek magazines.

After serving as class poet and chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine, Wilder left New Haven with a few notable classmates of 1928, including authors Dwight McDonald and James Agee.

By day, Wilder hobnobbed with America's brightest journalists, but by night he jammed with the jazz musicians of New York's underbelly and listened to "race records" — 78's sold in black-owned music stores.

"That's how he got exposed to the new music," Eliza said. "New York was the place where all the creative music was."

Wilder Hobson's status as a writer, combined with his intimacy with the jazz culture, made him the perfect person to bring this "race" music to the mainstream.

On staff with Time, "he wrote for one of the biggest circulating magazines in the country," Eliza said.

But, "unlike many critics, he was a musician himself. He was a passionate person who practiced every day of his life," said his daughter. "He could write so mainstream society listened, but he traveled in those fringe circles."

Wilder Hobson was in the perfect position to bring "ratty" music into the consciousness of the cultural elite: New York's intelligentsia.

Still, said Eliza, "the jazz music itself has never been popular like rock 'n' roll. It's never really been in the mainstream of our culture."

That's why the Hobsons have high hopes for what might happen when America watches Ken Burns' "JAZZ," which will air on public television throughout this month.

"Jazz is perhaps the only really original art form that this country has," Eliza said.

So the Hobson family will be watching "JAZZ" together, and Eliza's son Wilder, named for his grandfather, will earn credit at Portsmouth Middle School, where he is in the seventh grade.

This month, PMS teachers will try to reveal the relationship between the arts — especially jazz and blues — and the civil rights movement.

Eliza is the parent coordinator for the special curriculum, which will feature blues artist T.J. Wheeler as an artist-in-residence over the next two weeks.

The efforts of artists like Wheeler and Burns may inspire musicians like young Wilder Hobson, who, like his mom, plays piano and guitar.

"He and his father gave me an electric guitar for Christmas," said Eliza, who first started strumming as a musical escape from the jazz culture that surrounded her family.

So Eliza passes on to her son what her father passed on to her.

"What a wonderful thing to leave your child is this wonderful world of music," she said.